The Story of Henri Tod (12 page)

But Henri Tod's corollary was that history tended to be dominated by the phenomenon of inertia. That unless individuals act decisively, antisocial forces tend to come together and form glacial tides creating their own momentum; thus the tyrannies survive, as the sloth persists; and the people, submitting, becoming the individualists
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the political philosopher Professor Michael Oakeshott had written about. The immediate condition for testing the social law of Henri Tod—that the people will choose freedom if they are given the alternative—was that the alternative had to be available. The mortal enemy of freedom, he generalized, was the inertial conspiracy which denied the alternative. Thus if the alternative had been more dramatically recognized by more people critically situated on July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler would have succumbed to, rather than survived, the inadequate attempt by Stauffenberg to assassinate him. Indeed, if an alternative to Hitler had been dramatized from the beginning, he would not have accumulated the power he did.

In Berlin, Tod would lecture his growing fraternity on the objective, namely the destruction of Communism-Nazism. He mingled with his young disciples, discoursing with them quietly wherever life was lived—at the corner of the bar with one or two members of the Bruderschaft, drinking schnapps or beer or wine (in the conventional division of Bavarian beer drinkers, Rhenish wine tasters, and Prussian schnapps drinkers, Henri the tea drinker did not fit at all); or in one of the meeting halls, though always discreetly—there were no public meetings. What he told them was at once simple, and complex. What was simple was that Berlin was the key to the future of Europe, as Hong Kong was the key to the future of Asia—and probably the world. Because in Berlin and only in Berlin, the great social point could be dramatically made: the people would choose freedom (and opportunity) over against slavery (and stagnation). If Berlin was kept operative as the permanently open sluice gate for human idealism, then eventually the glue that caused the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to stick together would dissolve. That substance, Tod would lecture, was no different from what had temporarily mesmerized virtually all of Germany into consenting to follow the orders of the mad and sadistic Hitler. If Hitler's borders, so effectively sealed early in his reign, had been more porous, he would not have lasted.

The purpose of a few men, annealed in idealism, vision, and courage, was then twofold: to keep Berlin open; to help those in Communist Berlin who were especially inhibited by the Communists to make their way across the dividing line of the city.

And the ugly part (Tod always began by acknowledging it as that): to discourage individual acts of sadism against those who chose freedom and to punish, most severely, those who organized most effectively to prevent East Germans from achieving their freedom.

Foremost of these offenders, of course, was Ulbricht. But Tod, early on, had ruled against killing Ulbricht. To do that, he argued, would be to give the Soviet Union the excuse it most wanted for resorting to intervention. True, the Soviet Union's armed legions were, every day, gathering along the perimeter of East Berlin in greater density. But clearly there was a felt reluctance actually to intervene, as had been done five years earlier in Hungary, and this notwithstanding that it was actually the Russians, not the Germans, who had juridical rights to govern Berlin—the right of conquest, shared with Americans, British, and French. But so great was the investment by Moscow in the pretense that the Warsaw powers were individually governed that it had been left primarily to Ulbricht, to his “council,” and to the omnipresent Vopos—the young, uniformed Communist-Nazis—to do the dirty work. Although it might be said that Ulbricht was the principal formal enemy, it was not for such as the Bruderschaft—the growing secret fraternity of young, idealistic Germans—to take on the job of dealing with Ulbricht. It was, however, the responsibility of the Bruderschaft to take on the job of dealing with Ulbricht's most unpleasant agents, and indeed the mission tonight, being planned at Number 12, was to arm in order to effect the elimination—incidentally from East Berlin, coincidentally from the planet—of a double agent, caught out.

Stefan Schweig had been born on the day that Adolf Hitler marched into the Rhineland, which made him twenty-five. His father had been killed, in Italy; his mother had nursed him in the hatred she felt for Hitler, and for the whole monstrous nationalistic atavism for which he stood. When Stefan's father was killed, his mother treated the news as more or less inevitable—or such was the memory of her eight-year-old son. Later, during the awful privations of 1945–48, she protected him by working as a subway janitor and, taking the earliest opportunity, she lectured her son that there were no interesting differences between the Communists and the Nazis “except for professors, who always study the unimportant things.” Stefan had not known what his mother meant by that, and in any event had a problem in reconciling her generalization with the sacrifices she was making to keep him in school, where he was exposed to professors for long hours every day.

But as he grew older, he began to understand. As Henri Tod understood instantly what Stefan meant when he said that the taxonomies of the social scientists were inverted. What Nazism and Communism had in common was that both systems sanctioned the killing and torturing of innocent people, and if one saw that, all else that was sayable about the nice ideological differences of the two systems was, well, trivial.

It was not trivial in the life of Stefan Schweig—notwithstanding that this would not be his maiden killing—that on this night either he or Henri Tod, depending entirely on chance or opportunity, would execute one Aristophe Spender. He needed, in order to satisfy his sense of obligation to the distinctions laid down by his dead mother, to repeat to himself that Aristophe Spender was
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an “innocent person.” Else? Else he, Stefan, was a Nazi, a Communist, a killer of innocent people.

He had had trouble, he confessed one day to Henri Tod, on the matter of “civil authority.” Stefan was a Catholic, and a Catholic, he reminded Henri, does not “execute” anyone. A Catholic is permitted to pull the trigger knowing that a bullet will then enter the brain of the man whose head lies between the crosshairs. But this must be a military act. And the “military” is a duly constituted division of government, as distinguished from the Bruderschaft. To which Henri had said that this was of course in general true, but that a larger view of natural law entitled the individual to deny the civil authority of those who exercised power in East Germany, and that such was the existing situation. After all, did Stefan Schweig believe that those who had met to murder Adolf Hitler on July 20 had violated the civil law about which the Scholastics had spoken? Stefan let the matter go, even though he did not feel that his curiosity had been entirely satisfied. Was he, tonight, going out as a soldier of an inchoate army of justice? Or had he appointed himself, or rather been appointed by Henri, a “civil authority”? But no more time for this.

Sophie had brought coffee, and had laid out on the kitchen table in the cellar the weapons from which Henri would choose those especially appropriate to the occasion. They knew the four sites in East Berlin in which their mark spent, at a guess, 85 percent of his time. There was his bachelor apartment, on Neue Blumenstrasse. There was the restaurant-bar he most generally frequented; indeed it could almost be said about Aristophe Spender that he had office hours at the Löwen-Eck. Almost every day he visited his mother, if only for a half hour or so, during which he watched television and drank the tea his mother brought him. And, of course, there was the Helsingforser Platz, where he was the superintending dispatcher of the state taxi fleet, operated mostly by veterans, many of them partly crippled, who were also the important sources of the information he sold regularly to the Bruderschaft.

A profitable relationship for both parties, and moreover a relationship almost three years old. But then last week Spender had reported that a particular taxi had been reserved to pick up Lt. Colonel August Hester at 11:30 at the Schwanenhof at Pankow, a watering place for highly placed East German gentry, which before the war had also acted as a discreet brothel, and was now showing signs of recidivism. The Bruderschaft had been looking for an opportunity to settle scores with Colonel Hester, who presided over what was generally referred to, in plain talk, as the Torture Wing of the Pechnow Prison, and had, in early April, himself presided over the torturing to death of a twenty-two-year-old member of the Bruderschaft whose older brother, aged twenty-four, now claimed the privilege of arranging to arrive at the Schwanenhof at the same time as the taxi carrying Colonel Hester. He did; and when, ready to do his duty, the avenging brother turned away from the newsstand at the corner at the same moment the colonel walked out of the noisy bar, the older brother was mowed down by two sharpshooters who had clearly been waiting for him. Aristophe had been paid twice that day, and the idea was that, tonight, he would be paid one final time.

The price on the head of Henri Tod was distractingly high, and accordingly he consented to Sophie's rather elaborate, but unmistakably effective, ministrations. His fine straight brown hair was soon gray and curly. His almond-shaped eyes had now just that little lift that gave them a squatness faintly oriental. A shadow under his left nostril suggested a scab not entirely gone. And the tip of his right front tooth was now gold. He appeared a slender man, in his mid-fifties, something of a roughneck. He was appropriately dressed, and his documents revealed that he was a butcher, employed in West Berlin at a large concern that provided fresh meat for the American garrison. Stefan Schweig was an assistant who, dressed in a sport coat and open shirt, looked slightly raffish, and could have been one of the hundred thousand young Germans who prowled the streets on Saturday looking for entertainment. Stefan carried a .38 and a powerful tear gas canister in his jacket pocket. Tod had a hunting knife, and the Hi-Standard .22 revolver he handled as adeptly as a barber a straight razor. It was a convention at Number 12 that when a meeting was over at which Henri Tod was present, Sophie would require that with a single shot he extinguish the candle at the far end of the room, in the center of the padded section that guarded the main safe, using the silencer. One time he had missed the target, the refractory candle continuing to give out light after the bullet had plugged the mattress behind. Sophie and company were amused at this unusual sign of Tod's fallibility. But Tod was desolate, and that weekend he devoted to recapturing his skill, and finished by putting out ten candlelights in a row.

It was still easy, on the S-Bahn, to cross over. Less so if one were carrying packages; so these Henri and Stefan did without, burying themselves, standing, in the smoker, and handing out their identity cards at Friedrichstrasse to the Vopos without bothering to raise their heads from the newspapers they were both reading. In the event either of them was searched, they had contingency plans, centering around Klaus, over in the corner in the oversized raincoat who, if needed, would materialize and identify himself as a Vopo inspector general, taking charge.

It was just after nine, and the killers ambled first to the Löwen-Eck where they sat, ordered beer, and began a game of skat, Stefan removing the playing cards from his pocket. After a half hour Tod asked the waiter whether Herr Spender was expected, as Tod had a message for him. The waiter shrugged his shoulders. “It's Saturday. Probably he'll work late at Helsingforser Platz. If you want, you can tell me, and if he comes in late, I'll tell him.”

“Yes,” Tod said, bundling up the cards, and to Stefan, “—it's getting late, old boy, let's roam about a bit. Yes, if you see Spender, tell him a friend of Colonel Hester wanted to express his gratitude. That's all,” and he put a 50-pfennig piece in the waiter's hand.

They spotted him at Helsingforser Platz. Normally he sat inside the glassed cabin, his knees under the long linoleum table at one end of which was the active radio dispatcher. Tonight he was standing in the cabin for a moment to check with the assistant dispatcher, then outside to resume what was apparently a heated conversation with an elderly, stoop-shouldered man wearing a driver's cap, presumably gone off duty and arguing with the boss. Henri walked past the cabin to the street corner, without looking left toward the dispatcher's box in the large parking lot. Now in the shadows, Henri stopped to light a cigarette and whispered, “Go over there, northeast corner. See the wind current over the chestnut stand? It's moving toward the taxi area. Lob the gas into the area of the back taxis when you see me, in the lead taxi, begin to drive out toward the dispatcher. There'll be a lot of confusion. I'll nail him as my taxi goes by. All right?”

“And then?”

“And then you go back to the bar, get the waiter, and tell him never mind about Spender. Colonel Hester delivered the message himself. Then get the hell back home.”

“And you?”

Henri Tod looked at his young confederate, and for a moment said nothing. “My job, Stefan, is to see to it that our people don't worry about me. Only the Communists. I will see you on Monday.”

They separated. Henri ambled toward the lead taxi and told the driver he wished to be taken to Oberbaumstrasse. The driver nodded, and then whispered, “Can you pay me in West German marks?”

“I'll split the difference,” Henri replied. The East German mark was selling on the open market for one quarter the West German mark, and in any event was not being accepted, by many West German commercial enterprises, as tender. Henri's reply had been conventional: He would agree to pay in West German marks, but he would pay half the taxi bill.

“All right.” The driver started the motor.

At that moment a few yards behind him there was a small explosion. It was followed by what seemed like a gusher of smoke, instantly felt by those downwind of it as tear gas, and now drivers, passengers, and pedestrians were yelling, coughing, beginning to run. Meanwhile Henri had rolled down the taxi window as the driver quickly engaged the gear and started out, well ahead of the airflow of gas. He followed the custom of pausing at the dispatcher's gate, where he yelled out his destination: “Oberbaumstrasse.” As he did so, Henri, his face largely concealed from the open window, fired a bullet into the brain of Aristophe Spender.